And the Winner Is…

Eleanor Catton has claimed the 2013 Man Booker Prize – as well as its £50,000 payout – for her second novel, The Luminaries. Catton had 11/4 odds to win this year’s prize according to popular bookmakers, Ladbrokes, and she has now become the youngest author to ever win the prestigious award. The four judges read 151 novels before deciding on Catton’s work, and chairman Robert Macfarlane estimates that the reading amounted to “about 21 kilometres of prose” at “12-pt Adobe Garamond.”

In a recent review for our site, Martha Anne Toll referred to Catton’s novel as “that rarest literary treasure, a book of such dazzling breadth and scope that it defies any label short of masterpiece.” She continued:
Deeply entrenched in New Zealand’s South Island, The Luminaries makes clear that this author commands the world at her fingertips. Her literary ancestry derives less from her homeland and more from the British and American giants of the nineteenth century. Catton deserves their company. Nodding to Melville, she’s nailed the tormented sea captain and the revenge obsessed “Chinaman.” With so many characters taking on false identities and trying to out-cheat each other in New Zealand’s gold rush, Catton, too, has mined the seamy underside of greed and poverty so beloved by Dickens. Like George Eliot, Catton looks behind the stereotype of the whore and the opium dealer and forces us to question where the real morality lies. By the novel’s end, every character’s initial presentation has been destabilized. Reader, Catton instructs, don’t judge a book by its cover.
Next year will be the first year in which American authors will be eligible to win the Man Booker Prize, which has previously been open only to authors from the British Commonwealth.

You can take a glimpse at the other books on the 2013 Man Booker Prize longlist and shortlist as well.

This year’s “Genius grant” winners have been announced. The MacArthur grant awards $625,000 “no strings attached” to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” Alongside scientists, artists and scholars are some newly minted geniuses with a literary focus. This year’s literary geniuses are:

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been a widely read journalist for years, but Coates’s 2014 piece for The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations” was a masterpiece of longform journalism that introduced him to many new readers. In it, he portrayed the idea of reparations for slavery, so often painted as a “fringe” solution, as not just plausible but utterly compelling and necessary. Riding the wave of that piece and an American public, in the wake of Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere, newly alert to the state of race relations in America, Coates’s publisher Spiegel & Grau pushed up the release date for Between the World and Me. In true Coates form, the book is parts history, polemic, journalism, and memoir, all in the form of an open letter to his teenaged son. Between the World and Me was recently longlisted for the National Book Award and it sits atop our Top Ten list. Our own Sonya Chung wrote an essay about the sometimes tone deaf reaction to the bestseller. Coates’s first book, a memoir called The Beautiful Struggle, was released in 2008.

Ben Lerner is the lone novelist to be honored by the Macarthur Foundation this year (though he is also an accomplished poet and critic). He is best known for his decidedly metafictional novels, featuring protagonists that are mirrors of the author. Of his 2014 novel 10:04, we wrote:
If works of art were about something, instead of existing self-sufficiently for themselves, this is what Lerner’s work would be about: the chasm between a life lived and a thing made; the discouragement one suffers when trying to find one in the other.
Lerner also featured in our Year in Reading in 2014. His 2011 debut novel was Leaving the Atocha Station, and he has published three collections of poetry: Mean Free Path, Angle of Yaw, and The Lichtenberg Papers

In its announcement, MacArthur says poet Ellen Bryant Voigt’s work meditates “on will and fate and the life cycles of the natural world while exploring the expressive potential of both lyric and narrative elements.” She has published eight collections, and the most complete introduction to her work is probably Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007.

Finally, the lone playwright to be named a “genius” this year is none other than Lin-Manuel Miranda (he is also a composer and performer). His genre-making musical Hamilton has become a smash hit. This New Yorker profile of Miranda is a great introduction to the man and his work.